


The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention

by triggerswaggiehavoc



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Fast Food, Humor, Implied/Referenced Sex, M/M, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-02 15:47:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10947681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triggerswaggiehavoc/pseuds/triggerswaggiehavoc
Summary: Someone once said that no two countries with McDonald's had ever fought a war against each other since acquisition of the McDonald's. That guy never met Wonwoo or Soonyoung.A tale of great regret.





	The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention

**Author's Note:**

  * For [habitualwords](https://archiveofourown.org/users/habitualwords/gifts).



> hello!! we don't know each other, but it was a pleasure to write this for you, and i really hope it's close enough to what u were wanting from this exchange!! i wasn't quite sure how well i would be able to execute the things u asked for, and i figured enemies to friends to lovers was probably my best bet, so that's what i went with. i liked writing this and i like it as a whole, and i hope you really like it, too. sorry it's so mf long also

Two months ago, Wonwoo’s guiding principle had been a set of ten short words: “I don’t care where I work. I just want money.” Today, he is regretting the simplicity and easy satiation of his stipulations. Every day since he set foot in this cursed building, he has regretted it, but today, right now especially, he is regretting it.

His thought process had been very painfully simple. He wasn’t going home for the summer between his freshman and sophomore years of college as he had signed a lease to live at a nearby apartment for the next year, so it would behoove him to find a job equally close by so he could spend his months off garnering funds rather than staring at the television from dawn to dusk and leaving him to wonder where his precious brain cells were off to and if they were planning on ever returning. With the padding of his wallet the only real parameter to meet, he applied to twelve different places and accepted the first and only offer he received, from the McDonald’s situated snugly just a street or two off campus. He never cared much for McDonald’s in the first place, but he would make it work. Money, he reminded himself. Dollars. Dinero. Doubloons. He could do it.

“Welcome to your new home,” his boss told him as he was ushered in on the first day, and Wonwoo only barely managed to avoid saying he would almost rather be homeless. The entire placed reeked of grease, which didn’t really surprise him, but expecting something and experiencing something are completely different activities altogether, and Wonwoo learned that very quickly. The entire building may as well have been made of grease. Sometimes Wonwoo was convinced it was, and sometimes he thought of trying to scoop out a chunk of the wall just to test the theory, but he was too unprepared for how it might affect his psyche if he pulled his hand out of the wall and found a tremendous glob of grease in it. He has nightmares about it sometimes.

Grease aside, there are a number of other reasons he hates working here. For one, he’s but a single clip of video evidence shy of certain that two of his coworkers are sleeping with each other, which he would not mind terribly were he not consistently forced to work with both of them at the same time, but he is quite often roped into shifts where both of them are present, and they are very disgusting, and Wonwoo hates them. He also hates that he feels like he has to take three showers every time he gets off work because the grime has sunk that deep into him, and he also hates the fake smile he has to wear and the way it hurts his cheeks. He especially hates working the drive-thru window because people who come through the drive-thru are all terrible. The drive-thru is his greatest source of regret about working here.

Tonight, he’s on drive-thru, has been since he came in at six, and he has additionally been ready to leave since 6:03, but it’s 10:15 and he still has 45 minutes until he can finally go home to take his three showers, so he’s toughing it out with the most genuine fake smile in his arsenal until his manager tells him he’s free. As usual, the drive-thru had been terrible all evening, but at long last, a break came, just long enough to give him a little breathing room. Six minutes and thirty-eight seconds. He counted them. Then that incessant beeping came back.

“Evening!” chattered a voice through the headset—Junhui. Wonwoo is always amazed at his ability to answer in that same cheery voice every time even if he can’t stand the guy. “What can I get for you today?”

“Just a soft serve cone,” crackled back through. That’s it? Junhui told the person to pull around to the first window, and that was it, and Wonwoo was so overcome with happiness that he could have kissed them when they pulled up to the second window. He even donned a very real smile while he swirled the ice cream onto the cone. What a blessed customer. What a lovely person. What a tremendous joy they must be to have around.

The smile was still decorating his lips when he slid his window open to deliver the treat. Sitting in the driver’s seat was a young guy who probably also attends Wonwoo’s school and is here over the summer, undercut and puffy cheeks and one single earring, and both he and his friend in the passenger’s seat were wearing grins that Wonwoo ordinarily would have and definitely should have found suspicious, but all he thought in those few fleeting seconds was that those two guys must have been really excited to share that ice cream cone.

“Here you go,” he said in a voice so bright he almost convinced himself he was actually happy. The guy behind the wheel reached forward for the cone. Time slowed down.

First, he grabbed the ice cream, as in the actual creamy frozen part. Wonwoo has heard of this occurring before in his life, but not since he was in middle school, and he truly did not realize this was something people actually ever did, much less something they continue to do. But it did not stop there. With his other hand, he grabbed the cone and pulled it back to himself while simultaneously smearing the vanilla ice cream in his first hand on as much of Wonwoo’s arm as he could reach. Frozen in shock, there was little else Wonwoo could do but watch through dead eyes as his arm was painted in dessert, and he was still a little too stunned to move when the final blow was delivered. The arm holding the cone reared back and, with very little fanfare, sent the cone flying forward to peg him in the chest.

Maybe a cold blow to the sternum was just what he needed to bring him back to reality. As the car peeled out of the drive-thru lane, Wonwoo finally got himself to move forward and lean out of the window. 616FVO. An old silver Toyota with a dent on the back fender. They underestimated Wonwoo’s supreme ability to focus when he’s pissed off and also his uncanny ability to hold a grudge. He leaned back in from the night air and blew a breath out through his nose. 616FVO. Locked in.

“Dude what are… The fuck’s on your arm?” Wonwoo turned around and found Jihoon there, staring at him like he was about the strangest person ever to step foot in this McDonald’s. Jihoon very frequently gave him that look.

“Ice cream,” Wonwoo told him. He watched the puzzle pieces drift slowly together behind Jihoon’s eyes until at last Jihoon held his hand out.

“I’ll take your headset for a little bit,” he said, eyeing the dripping mess and shards of cone hanging off the front of Wonwoo’s shirt like the world’s most hideous Christmas ornaments on its most unenthusiastic tree. “You head to the bathroom to wash up.”

“Thanks,” Wonwoo told him, and now he is in the bathroom regretting this godawful job, wiping ice cream off his arm and staring into the mirror and wondering how he wound up here when he has got both looks and brains and could surely be doing so much better for himself. He looks in his eyes and all he sees is death. Death and old grease. What he wants to find is a will to go on, but it’s either not there or very deeply buried, and as far as Wonwoo is concerned, there is not much difference between the two.

Once he’s cleaned himself off, he marches back out to his post with a slump to his shoulders and retrieves his headset. Junhui is smack dab in the middle of saying something when the sound waves are bounding against Wonwoo’s eardrum again.

“And then I’m going to take you and—”

“Jihoon’s not on the headset anymore,” Wonwoo tells him with a toneless voice and a very urgent press of the button. He hears Junhui huff and Jihoon snicker, and he really and truly does hate having to work with the two of them at the same time.

“Put him back on,” Junhui commands. Wonwoo can hear the smile. “I wasn’t finished talking to him.”

“I’m not putting him back on. Do work when you’re at work.”

“You’re the least fun person ever.” Wonwoo doesn’t care. He hears Junhui breathe in like he’s about to say something else, but a well-timed beep cuts him off. “Evening! What can I get for you today?” And the cycle continues.

When Wonwoo is finally back at his apartment and on minute 49 of standing under the shower spray and staring at the wall and waiting to feel clean again, it finally hits him how angry he is. Who does that? What rational, licensed to drive, fully-functioning, college age human being orders a cone of ice cream in the McDonald’s drive-thru after 10 p.m. just to throw it back in at the employee? None, he reminds himself. No kind of rational, licensed to drive, fully-functioning, college age human being does that. Which brings him next to the question: What kind of absolute asshole shithead sits-in-the-front-row-of-the-lecture-hall-just-to-fall-asleep piece of garbage person has been lurking right under his nose this entire time? Wonwoo could have passed this guy on campus before, and he wouldn’t know. The thought sends a chill up his spine.

For the other guy’s sake, Wonwoo hopes he never sees him again. For his own sake, too. He can usually hold himself together in public just fine, but he can physically feel his head inflaming with rage when he thinks about that guy’s dumb smile and dumb earring, so he can’t make any promises for his behavior this time. He doesn’t want to end up in jail for murder. Best for all parties involved if he never lays eyes on that car again.

Thus, he suffers through another few hellish weeks of work at the golden arches, taking his twenty showers a week and infusing the scent of grease into his very bones. The worst thing is that sometimes he still craves a good old fashioned burger and some fries, only the thought of having a McDonald’s hamburger anywhere near his mouth, let alone inside of it, is enough to make his stomach churn, so he has to seek out the other places in town that have yet to be tainted by experience behind the counter. Today, his location of choice is Burger King. He hasn’t been to a Burger King probably since he was in high school, and he really misses those fries more than most of his old friends.

The drive-thru looks backed up when he pulls into the parking lot, so he decides to go inside, and it is on his journey in that he notices a very familiar silver Toyota out of the corner of his eye. Curiosity gets the better of him. He turns. He looks. He reads the license plate. 616FVO. Amazing. Unbelievable. His heartrate spikes and he feels his blood temperature increase by roughly two hundred degrees, but he has already talked these fries into his heart, and he’s not leaving without them. So long as he sits at the farthest table away from that stupid guy or just leaves with his food, any prospective incident will be averted.

Oh, that it were so simple. Upon entering, he spots behind the counter an undercut and earring in very close proximity that haunt his rage dreams, and he wonders deep inside if he can do it. The fries, he reminds himself. He also reminds himself that there are other Burger Kings in the world. He also reminds himself that he is a mature adult who knows how to behave himself in the presence of unpleasant people, and with this final reminder, he marches boldly forward to the counter to place his order.

“Hello!” the guy crows, voice cheerful and welcoming, and Wonwoo is immediately seeing red. “What can I get for you today?” That’s Junhui’s line, you asshole, Wonwoo is two seconds away from saying, but he’s so mad he can’t get his lips to move. He’s also too enraged to read this guy’s name tag or focus on looking at the menu, and when he finally does get an order out, he doesn’t even know what he says. Such is the effect of fury. All he does know is that whatever he got was definitely a combo, which means he’s getting fries. That’s what matters.

Given that he is way too far gone with anger to read the number on his receipt, he is left to sit and wait for the tray to be slid out to him alongside a glance that says, _This food is yours_. He fills his cup with soda from the fountain and sips at it while he waits, impatient and irate, eyes anywhere but on the human shitstain standing behind the register. His rage thirst drives him very quickly to a second refill, and when he turns back around with his newly full cup, he sees a tray being slid slowly out to him by his new least favorite Burger King employee in the world.

“Here you go,” he cheers, then, “Have a great day!” Wonwoo has never been so rabid with wrath in his life. This punk is smiling, and it’s objectively a very nice smile, but more importantly, it is a smile completely devoid of remorse, a smile which looks to be absolutely unaware that it is in the presence of the fellow food service employee it was a dick to. What kind of self-respecting fast food worker even does that to another fast food worker? Yeah, Wonwoo will have a “great day.”

It happens very quickly. Wonwoo tightens his grip around the base of his completely full cup, then throws it forward with all the strength his thin arm has at its leisure. While he intends to just fling the lid off and splash a terrible amount of soft drink all over everything, what actually happens is that the cup slips from his hand along with the lid flying off, so in the midst of soda spilling everywhere, his new mortal enemy receives a nice smack in the face as well, dumbfounded at the sticky mess around him. Another patron sitting at a table near the counter looks up at the commotion with a dropped jaw.

“Sorry, I sneezed,” Wonwoo lies, completely without apology, and he thinks he sees the very smallest spark of recognition behind those eyes right before he realizes what he has just done and consequently realizes that it is in his best interest to hightail it out of this building before a manager arrives to accost him. That in mind, he scoops up his sandwich and fries off the tray and sprints out to his car as quickly as his legs will carry him, speeds out of the parking lot so fast he’s sure he’s broken some kind of law, and doesn’t dare even blink until he’s made it all the way home. Turns out he is not as much of a mature adult as he originally thought, but when he chews that first fry, all he can think about is how good it feels to get even.

In the midst of the slowly worsening smell of cheap French fries, Wonwoo fades in and out for the rest of the summer. He keeps bolstering his bank account at the blistering rate of ten cents above minimum wage, his coworkers keep probably fucking each other, his shower keeps seeing more and more of him after every shift, and that asshole doesn’t come back to the drive-thru again, so by the time classes are resuming, all is forgotten, replaced by fresh lamentations that he did way too much working over the break and not nearly enough sleeping. Classes start on a Wednesday, which means his first Japanese class of the semester is on Thursday, and while he’s normally excited for that class, something feels incredibly off from the very moment he’s set foot through the door.

There it is, in the second row from the back, where Wonwoo would normally want to sit but now has to expressly avoid. That undercut. That fucking earring. Unbelievable. Wonwoo wishes with every cell that someone would punch him in the gut and he would wake up from whatever nightmare it is that his life has become, but there’s no one in class yet but that douchebag and the professor, and her welcoming first-class-of-the-year smile sure doesn’t look like it’ll be sending any fists his way in the near future. For a moment, he contemplates leaving the classroom and reentering later, when there’s a more substantial pool of students to dilute his presence, but he decides that would arouse suspicion and instead elects to very pointedly sit in the second row from the back in the absolute farthest seat possible away from that other guy.

Unfortunately, this building sucks, so the chair creaks a little bit when he sits down, and it’s just unquiet enough to draw the attention of the single person on earth he’d like to avoid drawing the attention of. Against his instincts, Wonwoo turns to take a glance when he sees the head flip toward him in his periphery, and they make two seconds of very uncomfortable eye contact before the guy’s brow lowers and jaw drops and he goes from looking perfectly approachable to appalled and outraged. Wonwoo keeps his expression as neutral as possible even if the sight of that face still makes him want to anger puke and turns back to face the front of the classroom, where absolutely nothing is occurring. As he stares at the empty white board, he notes that he is still being very devotedly gawked at from several seats away, but he refuses to turn back and meet that gaze.

“Dude!” A shuffle at the door grabs Wonwoo’s attention, and he turns to lay eyes on Joshua, a guy he never met before entering university but who had been in both of his previous Japanese classes with him. He stands with both hands raised triumphantly, glittering grin stretching across his distinctly pretty features, and Wonwoo feels himself smile without meaning to. In some ways, he thinks very small parts of him very deep down are kind of in love with Joshua in the very shallowest ways, for how he’s pretty and nice and helps Wonwoo with his homework whenever he asks. He meanders up and takes the seat beside Wonwoo without hesitation, clapping his hand in a high-five that he transforms very seamlessly into a handshake. “I can’t believe we’re in the same class again!”

“Me neither,” Wonwoo says, but for some reason, what he really means is that he can’t believe that other guy is in their class after Wonwoo managed not to learn of his existence at all for two blissful semesters. Joshua nods and slips his textbook out of his backpack, smacking it a little too hard on the desk. Wonwoo sees the tool past him flinch and has to resist snorting.

“I have a good feeling about this semester,” Joshua confesses, almost bordering on song. “Mingyu’s even gonna be in our class this time.”

Ah, the fabled Mingyu. Wonwoo has never met him, but Joshua talks about him enough that he often feels like he has. They went to the same high school and are apparently the best friends the world has to offer, and the way Joshua talks about him, Wonwoo is sometimes led to believe both that they are more than just very good friends and also that Mingyu was individually crafted by god himself and sent directly to earth via express mail. Half of Wonwoo is excited to finally meet the legend in the flesh, and the other half of him is wholly dead inside at the high prospects Joshua will now be doing all his dialogue practice and in-class grammar activities with Mingyu and leaving him out to dry. At least one of them is going to have a good semester.

Very slowly, the rest of the class files in and fills the empty seats, including Mingyu, who Wonwoo guesses looks enough like he was handmade by god to justify Joshua’s ravings about him, though he can’t say he seems substantially more exceptional than any other guy Wonwoo’s met who’s really nice and likes to smile, just a lot more handsome than most people he knows. Joshua’s smile grows ten times bigger at the sight of him, though, and Wonwoo works hard all hour to smother those very teeny parts of him he thought about earlier.

One staple of the Japanese courses at this institution are the welcome back exercises at the beginning of each semester, where the professor passes out little sheets with questions in Japanese printed on them and instructs the students to go around asking the questions until they find someone who fits the bill. It’s supposed to get them to meet each other, but nobody is ever very into them, so most people just find their friends and try to loosen the definitions of the questions until they’ve found the greatest number of blanks they can possibly weasel each other into, aside from Mingyu, who must be very into it, because he goes up to every single person in the room and asks them at least three of the questions before penciling in a name. It is through this extreme try-hard approach that Wonwoo learns douchebag’s name is Soonyoung, which he really wishes he could hate more, but unluckily for him, it’s no more than a perfectly decent name attached to a perfectly indecent person.

Class ends with the declaration that there will be a review quiz next time they meet, and as Wonwoo has no other classes on Thursdays, he begins his merry walk back home to pretend he’s going to study for that quiz and instead just sit down and stare at the wall for four hours. Before he’s made it too far, he feels a hand clamp on his shoulder, and he can tell even before he turns around that a single earring is waiting there to greet him, but it doesn’t bring him any less dismay when he sees it. A very deep frown sits on Soonyoung’s face, very angry eyebrows, and Wonwoo partially wonders if he’s about to get decked in the middle of this crowded hallway.

“I have to get to class,” he lies, and Soonyoung narrows his eyes like he can tell it’s a lie, but he doesn’t call it out. Instead, he drops his hand and digs it into his pocket, but his eyes are hard enough to keep Wonwoo from walking off just yet.

“What’s your problem?” Soonyoung asks, and Wonwoo is so stunned he nearly falls over. What’s _his_ problem? That would be a perfectly good question were Wonwoo the one asking it.

“Excuse me?” he sputters, and Soonyoung flattens his lips.

“Switch to the other class or something. I don’t wanna have to see your face all semester.” Wonwoo wishes he had someone to turn to and make a kind of face that says _can you believe the nerve of this guy_ , but as it is, he has no such person, so he’s stuck looking back at Soonyoung like he can’t believe his ears, because, frankly speaking, he cannot believe them.

“Even if I could get the other class to work in my schedule,” Wonwoo tells him, “I still wouldn’t switch into it just to appease you. You can switch into that section if it bugs you that much.” He turns and stalks off without affording Soonyoung the luxury of being able to say more, and when he gets home, his four hour session of study avoidance turns into four hours of being so outrageously angry that he doesn’t even realize time is still passing.  Things are not looking up with regards to that quiz.

“I think it must be destiny,” Junhui tells him the next time he has work, dreamy hand clutching his heart. “Just wait. Somewhere down the line, you two are going to be twelve years married with your picket fence and generic suburban house and dog named Lyla and everything.”

“Don’t project your weird fantasies onto me,” Wonwoo huffs. “Besides, I really, legitimately, 100% hate him. He’s an asshole.”

“You say that now,” Junhui scoffs, “but you’ll be singing a different tune one month from now when you’re deeply in love with him.” Wonwoo sighs.

“This is why I hate working with you.”

“Oh, really?” Junhui smirks, and Wonwoo doesn’t like the look in his eyes. “I thought you didn’t like working with me because Jihoon and I are—”

“You’re right,” Wonwoo interrupts. “There are a lot of reasons I hate working with you. Thanks again for constantly reminding me of all of them.” Junhui laughs a laugh that is absolutely grating in how charming it is.

“My pleasure.”

Exactly as expected, Joshua and Mingyu are attached the hip, or maybe even both hips, or maybe even the face, and Wonwoo is brutally abandoned the second they’re commanded to pair up and practice the new grammar points at the advent of the semester’s first chapter. Already knowing something is going to happen, he finds, does not make it suck any less when it actually occurs, and he feels a bitter sting when he watches Joshua turn to face Mingyu instead of him, the absolute lack of hesitation just another smack to the face to top it off.  For a good, long while, he considers asking if he can barge in and make their twosome into a threesome, but he struggles to think of a way to ask that sounds less weird and disgusting, and before he’s come up with one, he spots the professor’s eyes on him like a hawk, finger pointing him to another unlucky soul in the class who doesn’t have quite enough friends.

His trip over is perfectly fine until he starts paying attention to where he’s heading, catches a glimpse of a few things he doesn’t particularly want to catch a glimpse of, namely a lone earring and a very distinct haircut, and he is only kept from turning and booking it out of the classroom by the firm teacherly gaze held on him while he meanders over. When he sits, he’s sure to slam his books and bag and body down with more force and a much louder clamor than he knows he needs. The sound snaps Soonyoung the Asshole out of where he was zoning out looking at the wall, spine shooting into a straight line. At first, he fixes Wonwoo with a passively surprised look that is irksomely not-that-unattractive, but it quickly morphs into the ugly frown he’s grown so used to hating.

“What do you want?” he spits, and Wonwoo’s skull aches from the force he has to exert not to roll his eyes.

“I came to do this exercise with you,” he spits back with venom, jabbing his finger at the text on the page in Soonyoung’s open book. He frowns back even harder.

“Well, go away. I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to you either, but sensei told me to come over here,” he snarls, thrusting his thumb toward the offending sensei. “So we may as well just do it.”

Still looking less than thrilled, Soonyoung groans and concedes anyway, turning his attention to the book page and reading off the first line of example with an amount of enthusiasm Wonwoo would struggle to underperform. To Wonwoo’s tremendous chagrin, his Japanese pronunciation isn’t even bad enough to the point where he can hate him for being lousy. It’s actually really good, and he also doesn’t make any mistakes in the exercise either, which leaves Wonwoo able only to hate him for being fine at something Wonwoo is also fine at. He’s seething by the time he runs back to his seat for no reason other than he wishes Soonyoung were so much worse.

“It’s kinda funny you were partners with Soonyoung,” Joshua says when he sits back down, lips curled in an alarmingly feline smile. “Mingyu said he always did his class exercises with Soonyoung, and you always did yours with me, so now we, like, switched.” The light laugh that slips off his lips is almost enough to make Wonwoo’s very tender center agree that it is a little funny, but distinctly not quite up to par.

“Can we switch back?” he would love to ask, but Mingyu whispers something into Joshua’s ear and turns his laughter from quiet chuckles into ringing peals that sound a lot like _hell no_ and _not even in your dreams_. Joshua whispers something back that makes Mingyu laugh just as much, and the professor eyes them with eyes that say she wants them to shut up and a wavering smile that says she doesn’t really want to have to tell them explicitly to be quiet. After a while of pressurized staring, they devolve into elbowing each other in the ribs with painfully unrelenting grins, and Wonwoo decides that Mingyu is another evil force in his life.

Within the first month, they are assigned to record a dialogue outside of class and submit it online. They’re allowed to choose their partners, which for Wonwoo means he is allowed to watch Joshua and Mingyu choose each other and then wait and hope that the last person in class without a partner aside from him is someone who isn’t Soonyoung. As the universe is eternally hilarious and unkind, there could be no other such companionless student in class besides Soonyoung, so now he is forced not only to have to see his face in class, but he must also set aside another block of his precious personal time and reserve it to poison with the air Soonyoung breathes. The sole boon of the arrangement is that they’ll probably get it over with quickly since they both do fine in class, but that’s not sufficient cause to make Wonwoo any less angry.

“Are you gonna write the script, or do you want me to write it?” Soonyoung asks through gritted teeth when he catches Wonwoo by the shoulder again after class. Despite no hostility in the words themselves, Wonwoo still gets the vibe he’s about to have a fist buried in his nose. The moneymaker cannot take that; he relies too heavily on this mug to fill the tip jar by the drive-thru window.

“What would you rather do?” he asks, and he honestly means for it to sound much more pleasant, but the hatred is rooted so deeply inside him that it still sounds like a challenge to a brawl.

“I’m fine writing it,” Soonyoung tells him, very much like an insult, then follows with, “I can have it done tomorrow, so when do you want to do it?”

“I’m free after three, but I have work at six.”

“I’ll get a room in the library,” Soonyoung spits, and then he is off down the hall, leaving Wonwoo’s shoulder probably bruised and Wonwoo himself feeling a lot more like he just got in an argument than arranged the deals of a meeting with a classmate.

While he walks home, he wonders what even gives Soonyoung the right to think he’s allowed to hate him that much. Sure, maybe he had perhaps splashed a large cup of soda all over him while he was working, but it wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. That was what the kids call justice, and Wonwoo was no more than a humble server delivering exactly what had been ordered. If Soonyoung can’t understand that he deserved that, Wonwoo does not owe him the grace of trying to settle their differences and work out an agreement to where they can be peaceful classmates and nothing more. Maybe if Soonyoung apologizes first, Wonwoo thinks. Maybe. But definitely not in any other case.

Being forced to interact with Soonyoung in class is one thing, but being isolated in a tiny study room with him at the library and having no witnesses around to testify that it was Wonwoo who killed him is a completely different situation. It’s so much worse when there is no set of teacher’s eyes casually on them to ensure they don’t go for each other’s throats, no neutralizing presence of students surrounding them to diffuse the boiling rage. Wonwoo is pissed to a degree he can’t even explain from the very moment he sets foot in the enclosed little space, and all Soonyoung’s done so far is make eye contact with him. His stupid little earring jingles around when he digs the script out of his backpack and smacks it on the table.

“Look over it to make sure there’s nothing wrong with it,” he says very abrasively, and it grates at Wonwoo’s nerves even further.

“Fine,” he returns even more abrasively, and it’s hard to make his eyes focus on the characters when his vision is shaking with anger, but at length, he manages to focus and also to find a mistake in the third line. “This particle is wrong,” he says.

“What? Let me see.” Soonyoung yanks the paper back and scrutinizes the spot where Wonwoo pokes his finger. “No, that’s right.”

“It’s wrong.”

“It’s right,” Soonyoung insists. “You’re wrong.”

“I’m right and you’re wrong,” Wonwoo argues back in frustration, flinging his arms in the air. “Check the textbook if you don’t believe me.”

“I don’t need to check the textbook because I know I’m right,” Soonyoung snaps back. “Why don’t _you_ check the textbook?” Wonwoo’s world is very suddenly bathed in red.

“Oh, I’ll check the damn textbook,” Wonwoo near-screams, throwing his backpack onto the desk and whipping the book out with a speed that cracks his wrist. He flips through the pages frantically until he finds the grammar point he’s looking for and jabs his finger at it. “Fuck you,” he says.

“That says I’m _right_ , dipshit,” Soonyoung retorts, smacking his hand on the open page. “Did you even read it? Fuck _you_.”

“Fuck you!” Wonwoo says again, closing the book on Soonyoung’s fingers with a loud clap and standing up to leave. “I’m not doing this.” Soonyoung’s hand around his wrist stops him before he makes it out the door.

“We have to do the assignment,” Soonyoung reminds him, tone less than kind. Wonwoo shakes the hand off.

“We can do it when you fucking apologize,” Wonwoo tells him. Soonyoung’s jaw dislocates, hangs there limp and useless above his chest.

“You want _me_ to apologize?” he sputters. “Because you were wrong and then you slammed my hand in a book, I owe you an apology? In what world does that make sense?” He stabs a finger in Wonwoo’s direction that lights him on fire in the worst way. “You’re the one who should apologize to me.”

“Fuck you,” is all Wonwoo says, one final time before he struts out and slams the door behind him. More than a handful of the library’s other patrons turn to glare at him at the loud bang, but he’s so mad he can’t even get embarrassed, just stalks out of the library and down the sidewalk and all the way back home to bury his face in his pillow and think about how angry he is until he has to get ready for work. The nerve, he thinks, the absolute nerve. Like hell will he ever be apologizing to Soonyoung. What next, thank him for covering his arm in ice cream? Fat chance. He’s more likely to stay on at McDonald’s until he gets promoted to CEO.

The grimace on his face when he walks into work that evening is a telltale sign not to bug him, but as Junhui is the way he is, he takes it instead as a sign to bug him even more than usual. “You sure look grumpy today,” he drawls, obnoxious grin on his face. Wonwoo spares him no more than a passing glare, but as he’s grown to expect, Junhui is not to be so easily deterred. “What’s the deal? Who shit in your boots?”

“None of your business,” he grunts, shoving the headset on. Junhui creeps closer, not much, but definitely enough for Wonwoo to find intensely annoying. “Go away. I don’t want to see you any more than I already have to.”

“Is it about that guy in your class?” Jihoon asks, sharp as usual, and Wonwoo tries his best not to flinch, but he does, and Junhui sees it and laughs hard enough to give him a headache. Wonwoo hates him so much. “What did he do?”

“None of your fucking business,” Wonwoo reiterates, but the end of _business_ devolves into a sigh before he has ample opportunity to stop it, and then his explanation is flowing undammed from his angry idiot mouth while his coworkers stare on with ever-dropping jaws and ever-widening eyes.

After he’s fully explained the entire situation, complete with every detail of backstory he’s previously neglected to mention (read: his eventful trip to Burger King), they do nothing but stand still and gawk at him for long enough to be more than just a little uncomfortable. When at last they turn to look at each other, Wonwoo gets the distinct sensation that they’re communicating through their eyes only, and he recalls just how much he can’t stand them. Jihoon’s face remains perfectly stoic all the while, but Junhui’s changes, eyebrows rising and mouth folding itself into a bizarre and unsettling smirk. A chill runs up Wonwoo’s spine.

“I hate both of you, and I don’t know why I told you any of that,” he says, and Junhui’s expression snaps sharply to a blend of shock and outrage, mouth hanging wide open, a lovely trap for flies.

“The second thing is fair,” Jihoon admits, eyes devoid of emotion and mouth set in its typical hard line, “but I don’t know what makes you feel the need to remind us you don’t like us at this particular point in time.”

“I just hate seeing you look at each other,” he grumbles. “It kind of makes me want to puke.”

“Why?” Junhui wiggles his eyebrows. “Afraid we’ll undress each other with our eyes and start fucking right in front of you?” Jihoon nails him in the ribs with a well-placed elbow but fails to disguise the sandy laugh that leaves his lips. Wonwoo shudders.

“Maybe.” Junhui guffaws and claps him on the back with a warm hand, leaving it in place much longer than he would in the ideal situation crafted by Wonwoo’s subconscious. A small patch of his back grows a little dewy, and he really should have thought to call out today.

“Don’t be nasty,” Junhui says, close to his ear. “If we wanted you to watch us, we’d at least go somewhere a little classier.” Jihoon rolls his eyes and stalks off to go sort fries into their glowing red prisons. Wonwoo follows him in vision alone, tries not to think about any images but the fully-clothed, uniformed ones before him, and also tries to pretend both that Junhui’s hand is not on him and also that he knows exactly where it’s been. Nothing works.

“Please get your hand off me,” Wonwoo begs, more with his eyes than his voice, and Junhui complies, but he doesn’t leave him just yet.

“In all honesty, though,” he begins, eyes softening, “you should sit down and have a talk with this guy sometime. It’ll be a lot better for you in the long run.” Wonwoo scoffs, partly because it’s ridiculous for Junhui to say anything even remotely serious and partly because he refuses to take anything Junhui says seriously. A fist shoves at his shoulder. “I mean it. Jihoon and I didn’t always get along as hot as we do now.”

“Why should I even bother talking to him?” Wonwoo spits, stalking over to the drive-thru window. “What do you want me to do, apologize?”

“Duh.” He whips around with a force that cracks his neck and finds Junhui standing in the same exact spot, still and very straight-faced. Wonwoo searches fruitlessly for a punchline somewhere in the folds around his mouth, but all he finds is traces of the yellow restaurant lighting.

“Are you kidding?” he barks. “He’s the one who should apologize to me!”

“Here’s a revolutionary concept for you.” Junhui aims a finger gun at Wonwoo’s chest. “You both need to apologize to each other.” He fires. Direct hit. Critical damage. Wonwoo bends his face into a frown deeper than the ocean’s least explored trenches.

“But—”

But Junhui is already marching toward his own post, so Wonwoo has no choice but to turn his eyes to the POS and get ready for the influx of orders. A voice crackles into his ear, raised a few pitches higher than normal to become a nasally whine. “Do work when you’re at work,” Junhui drones. Wonwoo can hear that annoying grin on his face, and it makes him want to smash his head into the computer.

“I don’t sound like that,” he buzzes back.

“But you still knew it was you.”

“I hate you.”

Beep. Beep. Click. Junhui’s regular voice rattles against his eardrum again.

“Evening! What can I get for you today?”

Wonwoo turns over the prospect of having a civil chat with Soonyoung in his head for a while, but no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t get it to seem like a viable option, especially not when he remembers how he blew up at Soonyoung for being right about something. In retrospect, it only gets more unreasonable the farther he gets away, and just thinking about it dyes his cheeks an embarrassed red, makes him want to drop the class just to avoid the shame of having to look Soonyoung in the eyes again, or the rest of his classmates, for that matter. Meeting Joshua’s gaze feels like a crime when he knows how much he’s acted like a two-year-old, and Wonwoo’s heart is certainly not strong enough to handle a sin so mortal.

He still doesn’t want to apologize, and his soul still refuses to cave in and do it, but he would consider it if Soonyoung apologized first, and he might hypothetically be able to get him to do that if he does something really nice and sets up an atmosphere where he feels like he should apologize, such as buying him dinner, perhaps. Everybody likes food, Wonwoo reasons, especially when they don’t have to pay for it, and when Soonyoung realizes what a tremendously nice guy Wonwoo is, he’ll feel compelled to apologize in whatever shred of soul he actually possesses. A foolproof plan. Wonwoo is absolutely sure of it even if he knows Jihoon would probably tell him he’s the dumbest guy alive for thinking it’ll work at all.

Next class, he marches in and proceeds straight past his normal seat to perch in the one to Soonyoung’s left. For a good minute and a half, Soonyoung pointedly pretends not to notice Wonwoo’s presence, but Wonwoo powers through how annoyed it makes him to lean in a few more irritating degrees, until Soonyoung is forced to abandon his act and shoot him an unpleasant scowl. Tough it out, Wonwoo tells himself. Get through this, then get through dinner, then he’ll apologize, then everything can be fine and that assignment will be done.

“What?” Soonyoung asks, decidedly less than friendly. Wonwoo puts on his best service smile to answer.

“We still have to do the assignment,” Wonwoo reminds him cordially. “Are you free to meet up later today?” Soonyoung looks like he wants to roll his eyes, and it pisses Wonwoo off that he can tell that already.

“Yeah, my perfect script and I don’t have any plans,” he hisses, tapping the nail of his thumb on the plastic cover of his textbook. “Are you gonna throw another tantrum?” Wonwoo really wants to be amiable, but he’s making it so goddamn hard. Maybe Junhui’s advice wasn’t that great after all.

“Ha ha,” Wonwoo says. “Meet me at the library around four.”

“Sure thing, sunshine,” Soonyoung scoffs, flashing a very bright smile that Wonwoo determines in one second was designed for retail, specifically to handle difficult customers. His fingers wiggle at Wonwoo like he’s a fly sitting too close to the pies cooling on the windowsill. “Go on and get back to your seat.”

Wonwoo rises and stalks back without doing what he wants to do—make clear that he’s not returning to his seat because Soonyoung ordered him to and instead only because he wants to return to it—and does his best to force a smile the whole way. So long as he can get through one measly little talk and one single assignment, waters should be smooth sailing from here on out. At least, they better be.

Not one second after 3:53 that afternoon, Wonwoo arrives at the library and finds with disdain that Soonyoung has arrived before him. No need to be so punctual, he thinks, alongside thinking that he should have been even _more_ punctual and come at 3:45 instead. Unfortunately, it’s too late to go back to the past and tell himself to triumph over Soonyoung’s timeliness, so he bites back his aggravation and stomps up to greet him with an unconvincing smile. Soonyoung returns him one just as unconvincing, probably due to his eyebrows looking extremely angry and therefore rendering his eyes to lifelessness.

“Afternoon,” Wonwoo chirps, or tries to, but it comes out a lot more like a groan than he intends. “Ready to get this assignment done?”

“More ready than you probably are,” Soonyoung says, grinning, and Wonwoo resents the bite he tacks onto it enough to drop his fake smile, which prompts Soonyoung to drop his as well. “Did you reserve a room?”

“Uh, no,” Wonwoo admits. To his great annoyance, Soonyoung rolls his eyes. He’s probably been waiting to do that for hours, and Wonwoo can’t stand it. “I just figured we could find somewhere quiet or go outside or something.”

“Outside?” Soonyoung scoffs. “Have you not noticed how loud the frat guys on this campus are? We’ll never get it done.”

“I guess you have a point,” Wonwoo concedes with a frown. Soonyoung sighs like he’s Wonwoo’s exhausted babysitter or something, and Wonwoo hates feeling like he’s being treated like a kid.

“I know where we can go,” he says. “Just follow me.” Wonwoo doesn’t want to, and he’s not too keen on being ordered around, either, but he follows anyway, down the stairs and out of the library altogether, across a few more paths and to the humanities building. Most of the classes in this building take place in the morning, so this time of afternoon leaves a substantial number of empty classrooms at their disposal. After five doors, Soonyoung leads them into one such desolate haven of instruction and plops down in a desk right by the door, flicking the lights on as he goes. The way he does it makes it seem like he comes in here all the time, which strikes Wonwoo a little funny, since he doesn’t look much the studious type.

Rather than focusing on the crisp script Soonyoung withdraws from a lime green folder in his backpack, Wonwoo is more worried about coming up with a natural way to ask Soonyoung to have dinner with him. There’s no way he won’t be suspicious, not when Wonwoo has been so openly hostile thus far, but the plan is completely contingent on Soonyoung agreeing to dinner, which means he needs a reliable method of coercion less suspicious than the original offer. He’s so busy trying to come up with one that he misses the words coming out from between Soonyoung’s moving lips.

“What?” he asks. Soonyoung rolls his eyes. Again. Wonwoo would pay good money to punch them clean out of his head.

“I said, do you want to read through it a few times before we do a recording?” He smacks the paper for emphasis, just in case Wonwoo is too stupid to figure out what _it_ is referring to. “I don’t wanna have to record it a hundred times because we keep messing up.”

“Sure,” Wonwoo allows, and they commence reading the dialogue within the next breath.

It annoys him how smooth Soonyoung’s pronunciation is, how he doesn’t overstress particles like so many of the other students do, how he doesn’t add weird inflections where they don’t belong and doesn’t say the _r_ sounds all wrong. He sounds almost fluent, and it fills Wonwoo with genuine envy until he stumbles over a word in his fourth line and finally shows a flaw. Tiny smile creeping onto his lips at the blunder, Wonwoo embarks on his next line, but something about the lay of the syllables doesn’t feel quite right in his mouth. He turns them over in his head for a while before cutting Soonyoung off to say something about it.

“Hey,” he starts, “I know last time I said something was wrong and it wasn’t, but I really think this part isn’t right. It sounds super weird to me.”

“What part?” Soonyoung asks, not angry at all like Wonwoo expected him to be, eyes scrambling over the page for the error in question. He scrutinizes it for a few moments with a scrunched nose, and Wonwoo is two very dangerous seconds away from thinking that he’s cute when the expression slides off his face. His heart tightens. That was almost bad. “Yeah, now that you mention it, I think it might be wrong, but I don’t know what to change to fix it.”

“It could be… uh…” Abandoning words, Wonwoo grabs for a pencil and hastily writes in the correction he’s got in mind, small over the original script. He reads it out loud, and Soonyoung repeats it back to him, and they keep up a volley of reiterating the line for a good two minutes before Soonyoung cracks into a small grin more genuine than any Wonwoo’s seen on him yet.

“I think that’s right,” he says, then begins plowing on through the rest of the line Wonwoo didn’t let him finish, and in those few moments, Wonwoo almost forgets that he has to keep hating him until he gets his apology.

Little more than an hour later, they have the project wrapped up, and Wonwoo is feeling much better about his chances of not seeming suspicious than he had when he arrived at the library earlier. He kicks at stray rocks in the path while they meander back toward the library and the lot where Soonyoung’s parked, stalling the inevitable question until the very last moment out of pure desire not to have to follow Junhui’s advice, but when they cross by the library’s big glass doors, he feels his lips tear themselves apart.

“Do you have any dinner plans?” he asks. As quickly as an eye can blink, the calm air between them is replaced by one awkward and stifling, Soonyoung’s eyes narrowed and lips dipping down at the corners with no delay at all. Despite all of Wonwoo’s highest hopes, it seems he’s still intensely suspicious of even a hint of an invitation. If only he’d come up with those unsuspicious coercion methods like he planned on doing. Oh well.

“Why?” Soonyoung asks, wholly and unreservedly dubious. He looks around with suspicious eyes for the hidden cameras he likely believes must be there, the guy wielding a pie who’s ready at the utterance of a code word. Wonwoo lets a strained breath slip through his teeth.

“If you don’t, why not come get dinner with me?” Oh god. It sounds way too stiff, too scripted, too phony. Wonwoo wants to die. Soonyoung only gets more suspect than he was already, fevered hands flying to protect the contents of his pockets. Wonwoo sincerely hopes he does not look like he’s trying to rob anyone.

“What’s the catch?” Soonyoung asks outright, arms bent in a defensive cage around his torso, ready for whatever sneak attack Wonwoo’s got to throw at him. Parts of him almost wish he had a sneak attack to throw. “Why do you want me to eat dinner with you?”

“You know, just… why not?”

The thing about Wonwoo is that he’s never had terrific people skills. Working in food service is manageable because he can load his brain up with pre-scripted lines and rattle them off whenever he has to communicate with someone, but regular, everyday conversations with people he doesn’t really know are an entirely different beast. It’s easier when he either likes them from the get-go, like he did with Joshua, or can be extremely honest about not liking them with no repercussions, like he is with Junhui and Jihoon, but he is fully out of luck when it comes to a situation in which he has to pretend he doesn’t dislike someone he greatly dislikes, such as now. His brain short-circuits, malfunctions, and basically fucks him all the way over, makes everything he says sound completely bizarre and stupid, and gives him a stress headache on top. The half-assed, half-thought travesties of sentences coming out of his mouth right now certainly don’t seem to be fooling Soonyoung in the slightest.

“That’s really not a reason,” Soonyoung tells him, and Wonwoo sighs. He knows that already. He really does.

“I guess not.”

For a minute longer, Soonyoung doesn’t do much aside from watch his face for any changes that might give away his dastardly plot, a wordless standoff in front of the library entrance. What Wonwoo should do is abort the mission and scrap the plan completely, resign to just bearing a silent grudge against Soonyoung for the rest of his life and suffering every time he’s forced to interact with him in class, but he’s way too stubborn to do that, so all he does instead is maintain eye contact indefinitely, wait for Soonyoung to give in first.

“Alright,” Soonyoung says after the first millennium has finally rolled over into the second. “I’ll play your game, but I’m picking the place.” He starts to walk off in a calculated direction, steps heavy and purposeful, and Wonwoo clips along behind him.

“Sure,” he agrees. The walking stops just as abruptly as it began.

“What’s this?” he spits. “What’s up? What’s going on?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why are you agreeing so easily?” he stage whispers. The bushes catch his eye again, the trees, all the invisible secret cameras Wonwoo could have hidden in any of them. There’s too much air in Wonwoo’s lungs, and he has to sigh to get it all out.

“Because I don’t care where we eat.”

“But why not? What are you trying to pull?” His lips draw together in a thinking line, cogs turning deep in his skull. “Is this like one of those magic tricks where they tell me, ‘oh, you can pick any card right now, I have no way of knowing what it is,’ but then, no matter what card I pick, I can’t avoid the trick? Is that it?” Wonwoo gets the distinct vibe he’s had a few unpleasant run-ins with professional magicians that might be leaving mental scars.

“No,” he says plainly. “What are you so suspicious for?” Soonyoung looks at him like he can’t believe he even had the nerve to ask.

“You would be, too, if you were me,” he scoffs, and without a chance for Wonwoo to rebut, they are on the road again, walking away from the parking lot and toward the strip of restaurants adjacent to campus.

Nestled a few cozy yards down from Wonwoo’s beautiful McDonald’s of employment is a gas station, and across the street from that gas station sits a small, local restaurant Wonwoo thinks he’s only been in once, when his parents came to town to visit last school year. All he remembers about it is that one of the televisions mounted on the walls inside is horribly discolored and the couple that sat behind them ate about six trays of bread. For the sake of his wallet, he’s praying it isn’t too expensive.

As they walk by the McDonald’s, he tries to take a peek in and see who’s working, eyes sharp on the lookout for a smile that’s way too big and obnoxious for the face where it lives or a head that doesn’t rise over the counters as much as it should for someone who’s twenty years old. A fruitless effort, he finds, as all he sees is a line of customers long enough to make him extra glad he has the day off, so he gives up the search, but not before Soonyoung slows to a stop and asks him what the hell he’s doing.

“Just trying to see who’s working today,” Wonwoo confesses, turning his head back to follow Soonyoung, “but I can’t see.”

“Who’s working?” The curiosity in Soonyoung’s voice is genuine as he peers past Wonwoo to the glowing golden arches. “Do you work there or something?” Wonwoo’s skeleton turns to lead. What kind of joke is that?

“Fuck do you mean, do I work there?” he growls, and Soonyoung throws his hands up defensively, pleading innocence. Surely he can’t not know, Wonwoo thinks. There is no goddamn way he does not remember doing that.

“Sheesh,” Soonyoung whistles, “whatever. Forget I asked.” He turns and keeps up his procession toward their restaurant of destination, and Wonwoo follows on, head now swimming with fresh questions.

Judging by how the prices on the menu are expressed as actual monetary values rather than plain numbers with only single digits after the decimal and no dollar signs beside them, Wonwoo concludes that the bill for the evening should be pretty manageable, though Soonyoung does order an appetizer that he refuses to let Wonwoo touch or even look at for too long. Conversation throughout the course of the meal is stilted at best and torturous at worst, with Soonyoung still highly on guard and unwilling to say anything and Wonwoo’s brain too uncooperative to think of any good sequences of words to string together that are more than six syllables long.

“How will we be doing the checks today?” asks their server at the end of the most painful meal of Wonwoo’s young life, and she looks like it’s exhausted her, too, all those awkward stops back by the table only to find them eternally locked in what probably looked like a very intense staredown. Wonwoo will make sure to tip her well.

“Separate,” Soonyoung says before Wonwoo gets the chance to stop him. The waitress nods her head and starts to walk off, relief already flooding her poor muscles, but she stiffens again with haste when she feels Wonwoo grab her arm, unwilling to relinquish victory now that he’s come so far.

“Together, actually,” he tells her. “Just one check, please.” He feels Soonyoung’s eyes snap to him. He watches the server turn to look at Soonyoung.

“Separate,” he repeats.

“Together,” Wonwoo insists.

“We’re doing separate checks,” Soonyoung states, firm and convicted, and were Wonwoo any less contrary, he’d let him have it. As it happens, there are mules drowning in greed for a head like his.

“We are absolutely sharing one check,” he presses for a final time, looking the waitress so deep in her eyes he sees exactly where in the night she started wanting to find a new job. “He just likes to mess around too much. Ignore him.” She takes that as the very last word and dashes off, and when Wonwoo turns back to face his dinner partner, he finds he’s being glared at pretty intently, much more than he thinks he deserves. “What?”

“What the fuck was that?”

“What’s what?”

“Don’t play dumb, you ass,” Soonyoung snarls. “You’re making me pay for you? What’s your deal?” Wonwoo’s jaw leaves a dent on the tabletop.

“I’m paying,” he sputters. “Jesus.” The sourness lifts from Soonyoung’s expression readily, swiftly, like it was never there to begin with.

“Really?” he asks.

“Yes, really,” Wonwoo assures him. “Christ, what kind of guy do you think I am?”

“A dick.” He says it too fast. Something about that digs into Wonwoo’s gut right where it hurts. “But then, why are you paying for me? That’s just as weird.”

“Oh, you know.” Wonwoo shrugs, fishing for a good in excuse in a brain that which none to offer. “Just because.” Soonyoung narrows his eyes, then widens them, then narrows them once more, and Wonwoo wishes he were better at fleshing plans out.

“Wait,” he begins, “are you, like, trying to ask me out in a really weird way? Because I—”

“I’ll stop you right there,” Wonwoo juts in, hand raised to resemble a stop sign as much as flesh can ever resemble metal, “because definitely not.”

“What is it, then?”

Wonwoo now has two options. He can either tell the truth, or he can do his best to think up a better excuse that Soonyoung won’t question, something that actually makes a decent bit of sense. In his heart, he knows this means he really only has one option, because there is no way in this or any universe that he’ll ever be able to don his thinking cap and come up with something, especially not with Soonyoung right in front of him and demanding answers; that being said, he really, really hates the choice that’s left for him. A sigh crawls out of his throat, ages him a hundred years when it does.

“Alright,” he says, “I’ll tell the truth.” Soonyoung half rolls his eyes in a really irksome way, one that says things like _finally_ and _you shouldn’t have had to think about that_. “I thought if I did something nice for you, I could get you to apologize.” He gawks.

“You’re still on about wanting an apology?” he says, too loudly for a crowded restaurant, and lowers his voice when surrounding patrons turn to look at him. “I don’t know why you’re so fixed on that. I was right, remember?” Wonwoo rakes a hand through his hair.

“That’s seriously not what I want you to apologize about,” he yell-whispers.

“What, then?” Something clicks behind Soonyoung’s eyes. “Wait a second, I know you’re not gonna make me apologize for getting your order wrong or something.”

“Excuse me?”

The waitress returns with a single check at a very inopportune moment, opens her mouth to say something but can’t seem to form the words, looks like she wants to confiscate the silverware just in case things at this table get a little more physical. Instead of taking any cautionary action, she sets the check down between them and ambles off to escape whatever doom has descended upon her on this evening. Wonwoo snatches the check before Soonyoung gets the chance to think about it.

“Don’t act like you forgot,” Soonyoung mutters, low enough that Wonwoo can hardly hear it. “You came into Burger King before we even knew each other and splashed your fucking drink all over me. I remember you face.”

“You think that was because you got my order wrong?” Wonwoo scoffs. His pen is angry as he writes in his tip, enough to tear the receipt. “That was retaliation. Justice. You deserved that.”

“How in god’s name did I deserve that?”

“Do you seriously not remember?” He smacks the check holder on the edge of the table for their waitress to grab, once again alerting their fellow diners to the swirling purple cloud of conflict that’s descended in their midst. “Does coming to McDonald’s at ten o’clock at night and throwing a fucking ice cream cone at the drive-thru guy ring any bells?”

Soonyoung’s forehead wrinkles in thought. “I don’t…”

“Don’t even try to say it wasn’t you,” Wonwoo threatens. “I remembered your license plate number.” He jabs a finger at his ear. “And your goddamn earring.” Soonyoung’s hand rises to touch his own ear, run his fingers over the mentioned earring. His lips press flat for a long while before he speaks again.

“I guess that was, uh…” He scratches at the back of his neck. “Listen, I had a friend from high school who was in town for a couple days, and he wanted to do something really stupid. I totally forgot we did that.” Wonwoo tries to pretend that doesn’t make his blood boil.

“That’s all well and good,” he lies, “but I don’t think I asked why you decided to be the shittiest customer in the world.” Soonyoung releases a long-held breath.

“Fine. I’m sorry.”

“I don’t know if you’re doing that on purpose, but it really sounds like you don’t mean it.”

“I mean it,” Soonyoung promises, extending his hand across the table for Wonwoo to take, he guesses. “It was shitty and I didn’t really think about it that much and I’m sorry I threw ice cream on you.” Figuring it isn’t likely to get much better than that, Wonwoo takes the hand offered to him.

“Apology accepted,” he says. “And I’m sorry for throwing my drink all over you, but seeing your face made me really mad and I couldn’t help it.”

“Wow.”

“What? You would have done the same thing, probably.”

“Maybe,” Soonyoung allows, withdrawing his hand, then, “You should also apologize for getting mad at me for being right. And slamming my hand in the textbook.”

“Alright. I’m sorry about that.” Despite his misgivings, Wonwoo finds it feels pretty good to say sorry, especially when Soonyoung said it first. His chest feels a little lighter, eyes a little easier, and now that he’s no longer expending mental energy on actively hating Soonyoung every second of every day, maybe he can finally get on the road to being a happier person. Ha. Good one. “Now that I don’t have to hate you anymore, I’ll tell you that your Japanese pronunciation is really good.”

“You think so?” Soonyoung pipes up, bubbling into a sunny smile. “I’ve worked really hard on it.” In the pause between his last word and the beginning of his next sentence, their server returns to retrieve the check, and she looks more than just mildly surprised to see that they are not only both still alive but also evidently getting along much better than they had been before. “Actually, I’ll also say that you’re better than most of the other partners I’ve had in class the past two semesters.”

“Really?”

“Totally.” Soonyoung gives him a thumbs up. “Now that I don’t have to be pissed off every time I see your face, I’m glad we can be partners.”

As much of a backhanded sort of compliment as that is, Wonwoo can’t bring himself to be more than just a little annoyed by it. He won’t fill Junhui in on all the details, or probably any of them, but by the time he goes home, he’s substantially glad he took his advice. For the first time in many moons, he goes to bed with his brain not entirely consumed by rage.

Something feels a little bizarre when he walks into Japanese the next time class meets, but he can’t put his finger on it until he sits down in his regular seat and registers two things: firstly, Joshua’s seat is filled, and Joshua never gets to class early enough to beat him, and secondly, the silhouette slumped in the chair is most definitely not the delicate frame his heart’s hidden heart has quietly pined after for two semesters. “Morning,” Soonyoung tells him with a smile, and Wonwoo squints.

“What are you acting so chummy for?” he asks, and Soonyoung melts quickly into an irate frown.

“What are you being so mean for?” he shoots back. “I thought we were friends now, so I was just being friendly.”

“Friends?” Wonwoo looks at the ceiling like it’ll provide him with a little clarity. “I thought we just weren’t enemies anymore.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I want to be friends.” He unpacks his book, his pencils, his everything, completely transforming Joshua’s space into his own. “If you hadn’t splashed soda all over me, I would’ve wanted to be friends anyway, so now that it’s all Coke under the bridge, let’s just do that.”

Wonwoo gets some pretty distinct Junhui vibes from that line of thinking, but he looks different enough from Junhui that he’s able to kind of squash them down, pretend they’re less annoying. Maybe Soonyoung is just annoying anyway, and they’re doomed to hate each other forever, but Wonwoo’s already messed it up by trying to mend fences in the first place, so he guesses he may as well just give in. “Sure,” he allows, and Soonyoung grins at him.

A few minutes later, Joshua walks in and eyes his occupied spot with curiosity. He pauses only to say, “Morning, dude!” then continues on to the next seat down like it doesn’t bother him at all that his seat’s been stolen. He’s gentle beyond human bounds, Wonwoo thinks, and then a part of his chest he usually ignores kind of breaks over Joshua not even caring that he doesn’t get to sit next to Wonwoo because he has Mingyu to sit with, who is better and taller and has a really nice smile and looks like he probably smells like coffee or something. Wonwoo curses him internally, and immediately after doing so, Mingyu struts in as if on cue, repeating Joshua’s action of not really caring that his usual seating situation has been disrupted.

“Hey, buddy, you look like you’re in a good mood!” he says to Soonyoung, ruffling his hair as he passes by to take the seat beside Joshua. Soonyoung’s smile waxes a little and wanes a little, not quite certain what it really ought to do, and Wonwoo thinks he gets that.

All things considered, Soonyoung is not a bad person to be friends with. Sure, he likes to text a lot, and he can go kind of overboard with emojis, but Wonwoo is really used to receiving one text a month maximum if the stars are lined up right, so it’s a refreshing change to have someone talk to him on purpose rather than out of obligation. They also have more in common than Wonwoo expected, particularly in the case of something akin to very muted unrequited love for the former Japanese partners stolen from them.

“Be honest with me,” Soonyoung says once, while they’re studying vocabulary in the library. Wonwoo flips the flashcard in his hand over slowly and shakes his head. Wrong again. “Do you think Mingyu and Joshua are dating?”

“Probably,” Wonwoo admits with little thought. Soonyoung sighs.

“Yeah, I thought so.” Small puffs of laughter dance in the air when they meet each other’s eyes again, drooped at the corners, and against his better judgement, Wonwoo definitely feels something tugging underneath his lungs. His best judgement demands he ignore it.

Jihoon, as always, is far sharper than Wonwoo wants him to be. Every time Wonwoo comes into work, he shoots him a glance that says he knows more than he lets on, and by extension, Junhui shoots him a look just the same, only it’s forty times more annoying when he does it. Wonwoo is dying to know what exactly they think they’ve caught onto, but he’s also not too hot on the idea of saying anything that might lead to him having to expose himself, so he refuses to be the first to budge and ask any questions.

“Why don’t you come have dinner with us tomorrow night?” Junhui asks on some Tuesday evening, pretty far out of left field, and no matter how long Wonwoo glares at him, he can’t figure out whether it’s just a simple invitation to take at face value or there’s something Junhui’s hiding behind it, some hidden agenda he can’t crack. From where he’s sorting fries into their usual packaging, Jihoon throws a set of expectant eyes Wonwoo’s direction, waiting for an answer with less patience than most people typically have. If the walls really are made of grease, Wonwoo would like to pick right now to scoop himself out an exit and flee, but he knows that even if he could, the feeling of grease walls sliding between his fingers would be enough to rid him of any appetite for the rest of his life.

“I can’t,” Wonwoo answers. “I already have plans,” he continues, which is kind of true and also kind of not. He’d talked with Soonyoung earlier about maybe doing something Wednesday night, which they had yet to solidify, but he learned very quickly that Soonyoung was the kind of guy who always meant things when he said them and also brought plans into being within seconds of their intended realization. No sooner has Wonwoo’s response hit the air than Junhui and Jihoon are both snapping their fingers in a very _gotcha_ fashion. As much time has already passed, it still sort of makes his stomach turn.

“I knew it,” Junhui crows. “There’s totally something up with you lately.”

“I knew it first,” Jihoon reminds him with a sinister sneer. “Spill the beans, Wonwoo. The jig is up.”

“I have no idea what you guys are talking about.”

“My ass,” Junhui booms, and an innocent customer enjoying a chicken sandwich in the lobby whips his head around. “If nothing were going on, you would’ve just said, like, ‘No, I hate you guys,’ or something dumb like, ‘I don’t wanna watch you stick your tongues down each other’s throats on the table at Olive Garden.’”

“You’re going to Olive Garden?”

“Don’t change the subject!” Jihoon snaps. “We’re already onto you. It’s got something to do with that guy in your class, right? You never whine about him anymore.”

“You’re totally in love now,” Junhui asserts. “Oh my god. Just like I said it would happen.” He looks to Jihoon and proudly extends a finger to point at him. “You owe me dinner.”

“Fine.”

“How about you slow your damn roll?” Wonwoo suggests. “I talked to him like Junhui suggested,” and Junhui’s fist thrusts triumphantly in the air, “and we’re friends now. It’s none of your business.”

“You still have to buy me dinner,” Junhui informs Jihoon.

“Fine,” he agrees again, with far less of a fight than Wonwoo had been expecting. More and more these days, it seems like Jihoon isn’t putting up as much of a fight as he used to when Wonwoo first started working there; at least, not when Junhui asks him to do things. He’d love to pry into that, but he doesn’t want his nosiness to be mistaken for genuine interest, and he also can’t really ask anything while he’s strapped into the question seat, so he keeps his mouth shut.

In classic Soonyoung fashion, he decides on Wednesday afternoon that they should totally drive out to the drive-in theater nearly an hour away to watch _The Smurfs_ or some other equally terrible movie Wonwoo has no interest in watching, and though his heart harbors nearly nothing but desire to say no, he says yes anyway, because friends do things they don’t want to do sometimes for the sake of their friends who want to do them. Or something like that. Wonwoo does not usually retain very many friends.

The movie turns out to be _Cars_ instead of _The Smurfs_ , which is sort of less bad, but not by enough to make Wonwoo not regret going. Something about the animation of the cars into people and the fact that Lightning McQueen rides literally inside a fellow living vehicle with thoughts and a face has never sat well with him, and no amount of Soonyoung insisting that it’s the greatest movie of all time is likely to change that any time soon. For his own sake, he tries not to pay too much attention to the film, though that doesn’t leave him with many other options.

He could play a game on his phone, which Soonyoung would probably yell at him for doing, or he could try to spot some stars, which is impossible because of light pollution, or he could just go to sleep, which Soonyoung would almost definitely wake him up from. Faced with all this adversity, he just lets his eyes wander, which is a big mistake, because they wind up on Soonyoung, wholly transfixed on the movie in front of him, and then Wonwoo can’t seem to find the energy to move them.

Objectively speaking, completely objectively, he’s pretty cute. Wonwoo can admit that. His earring actually looks really nice now that there’s no unbridled rage attached to it, and his smile is big and pretty and full of a lot of teeth that make it infectious. It’s a smile with charisma, like Wonwoo thought Junhui’s smile was during the very first shift he ever worked, a really good one that’s hard not to want to see, and he doesn’t look like he’s about to stop smiling while he watches the movie now, not even when he turns to give Wonwoo a quizzical look. Is he supposed to be doing that? No, he’s supposed to be watching the movie. Fuck. Now it’s weird.

“What?” Wonwoo asks.

“What, yourself.” Soonyoung huffs. “You were the one staring at me.”

“I wasn’t staring,” Wonwoo sputters, heat rising to his cheeks.

“Sure looked like you were staring,” Soonyoung hums. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

“No, seriously,” Soonyoung giggles, prodding him in the chest with two soft fingertips. “What’s the deal?”

Here is a corner Wonwoo’s now found himself backed into. He can say that he just really didn’t care to watch _Cars_ and thus resorted to letting his eyes roam free, which is true but does not explain why he let them spend so much time on Soonyoung’s face, or he can make up something that he can pretend he wanted to tell Soonyoung on the spot and just say that, which he has already established himself as being very bad at doing. In the wake of two bad options, he accidentally elects for a third, worse one.

“My coworkers are convinced I’m in love with you,” he says, and Soonyoung’s cheeks get a little red, which makes Wonwoo’s get redder, but not before he thinks about willing his brain to cut off circulation to his heart on the spot to forcibly enact his own death. There are lists of things that should be said to people and should not be said to people, and Wonwoo knows very well which list that belongs on, so why in god’s name did that gem slip off his tongue? Soonyoung turns back to face the movie with eyes reeking of discomfort.

“Why do they think that?” he asks, awkward and audibly uneasy. Wonwoo would prefer he pretend he didn’t hear anything. “Do you talk about me a lot?”

“I used to complain about you a lot,” Wonwoo confesses.

“Wow.”

“Remember that I hated you.”

“Yeah, I guess you did,” Soonyoung whistles, neck stiff and eyes forward. “But now you don’t.”

“Yeah. Now I don’t.” He breathes out, careful not to stir too much of the dust on Soonyoung’s dashboard. “Anyway, I stopped complaining about you, which is why they think that.”

“I see.” For a long time, there is no sound in the car or even near it, only the distant rumble of the movie’s speaker shaking at the windshield and trying to get in. To Wonwoo’s ears, it sounds like they’re watching the movie from a mile away underwater, but that might just be his brain trying to drown itself. “You must work with some weird guys,” Soonyoung adds at last, and Wonwoo snorts.

“I hate them.”

“Not enough to complain about them, I guess.” Strange. Very strange. His voice doesn’t sound quite like Wonwoo is used to it sounding, and it gives him the feeling he really doesn’t want to know why.

“I hate them, but I don’t hate them, you know?” Wonwoo tries to amend. “Like, they’re really annoying, but they’re also okay.” He heaves a dissatisfied breath. “Mainly because they’re, like, banging or dating or something, so they’re just gross all the time, but they’re decent people.” Soonyoung guffaws, once, stiff and fake but trying hard to be real.

“You’re so weird,” he tells Wonwoo.

“You drove us an hour out to see _Cars_. I don’t wanna hear it.”

“But you still came,” Soonyoung sings. Wonwoo groans.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” Wonwoo concedes, and then it hits him out of nowhere that he really hates this movie.

He’d thought he was just negative neutral about it, but the more he watches the action on the screen, the more he recalls he seriously cannot stand this infernal film and never could, hates everything about it, from Owen Wilson’s stupid voice to that obnoxious Rascal Flatts cover. Much akin to a falling pallet of cinderblocks or an airborne anvil, realization strikes that he would never have agreed to see this movie if anyone else had asked him. Even under the guise of _The Smurfs_ , he still wouldn’t have agreed to anyone else, and he really doesn’t understand why, though he does know he absolutely should not divulge that information to Junhui or Jihoon ever.

It’s still bugging him on the drive back after the movie, alongside the uncomfortable silence that hasn’t really taken a break since he decided to loosen the reins on his lips a little too much. Soonyoung is usually a lot more chatty—to say his current level of quiet is concerning is a gross understatement—but Wonwoo is absolutely unprepared for any other consequences he may face should he decide to run his trap again, so he matches Soonyoung’s wordlessness resolutely, breath for breath, still and stone-faced in the passenger seat until they pull up in front of Wonwoo’s apartment. The car idles for a good few moments in the shabby little parking lot before Wonwoo gets the bright idea to unbuckle himself.

“Hey, Wonwoo?”

When Wonwoo turns around, he finds an unusual expression on Soonyoung’s face, neither smiling nor frowning, expressive nor neutral, and it sinks in his gut, iron stones. “What?” he asks, and for a moment, it seems like Soonyoung will answer him, but he shakes his head in the same breath, waves his hand over the seat.

“Never mind. I’ll tell you later.”

And then he drives off.

Wonwoo’s head is empty and full when he wanders up the stairs and faceplants in his bed. Now would be a good time to have other friends to talk to, but as it stands, Wonwoo’s poor interpersonal skills have left him with very few friends to name, let alone ones he could contact at a time like this, so he resigns to alternating between staring at the wall and scrolling through his meager contact list. Junhui’s name is the only one that stands out to his unlucky eyes. Terrific.

“This is unusual,” Junhui caws the second he picks up the phone, and Wonwoo has regretted very few things in his life as quickly as he regrets this. “What are you calling me for?” He hears what sounds like Jihoon in the background seconds before Junhui’s voice is hitting him again. “How was your date?” A chuckle chases it down, followed by another chuckle off Jihoon’s lips, and Wonwoo is so tired.

“I don’t know why I called you. I’m hanging up.”

“No, don’t hang up! What do you need?”

“Nothing.”

“Seriously, stop being such a dump on the fun truck.” Wonwoo believes he loses brain cells every time Junhui talks to him. He doesn’t know how Jihoon puts up with it. “What’s going on? Did you decide you actually do want to have dinner with us?” Wonwoo moves the phone from his ear to make sure he’s not remembering the time wrong.

“It’s 10:30.”

“Your point? Dinner happens whenever you eat, and we haven’t eaten yet.”

“Olive Garden is closed already.”

“Who said we’re going to Olive Garden?”

“You?”

“No, you assumed I was saying that we were going to Olive Garden in my hypothetical situation yesterday. I didn’t actually say that.” Wonwoo rolls his eyes.

“Why haven’t you guys eaten yet, anyway?” It hits him. “Wait, don’t tell me—”

“It’s called talking and enjoying each other’s company,” Junhui interrupts, very rudely. “Maybe you should hear of it sometime.”

“Whatever.”

“So are you coming or not?” A lot of unidentifiable rustling makes itself heard through the line, some footsteps, the slam of a door. “I can come pick you up if you give me your address.”

“Nah, I definitely don’t wanna be around you guys if you’re on a date.”

“But you called me,” Junhui sings. “Besides, I know you live near campus and what your car looks like, so I can just drive around until I find you and then honk in front of your apartment until you get evicted.”

“Please just tell him,” Jihoon chimes in, desperate, and Wonwoo groans.

Thus, he finds himself in the backseat of Junhui’s car, which is certainly too old to be running, strapped in beside several lined up shopping bags that could be completely full or completely empty, but Wonwoo is too scared to touch them and find out. In contrast with his expectations, the car smells completely fine and not at all like McDonald’s grease thanks to a bundle of air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror, and the only really bad thing is that he’s now inadvertently gotten himself stuck with the most annoying guy he’s ever met and the guy who is dating or at least screwing said guy. Jihoon sings along with the radio in between bickering over where they should go to eat, and when he descends into singing full-time, Wonwoo figures they’ve made their decision, though he doesn’t recall hearing a final verdict of any sort.

A tray carrying a Big Mac, a large fry, and an Oreo McFlurry hits the table in front of him with a thin clack, and Wonwoo scrunches up his nose. “Why are we at McDonald’s?” he asks as Jihoon assumes the seat by his side, bearing a 20-piece McNugget and a large soda. “Don’t you feel like you spend enough time here already?”

“Maybe,” Junhui allows, “but sometimes a man gets a craving, and this is the only place that satisfies.” To Wonwoo’s horror, he pops the lid off his McFlurry and digs a fry into it. To Wonwoo’s even greater horror, he puts the fry in his mouth and closes his eyes in satisfaction.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Jihoon doesn’t think it’s disgusting, and his opinion’s the one that matters.”

“I do think it’s disgusting, actually, I just never see a point in bringing it up.” Junhui widens his eyes, then shrugs.

“Guess both of your opinions are irrelevant, then.” He nods at the empty tablespace in front of Wonwoo’s chest, points at it with one frosty fry. “Are you sure you don’t want to eat anything?”

“The thought of eating anything crafted in that kitchen makes me physically ill.” One whiff of the building’s air on its own makes his stomach turn as confirmation. “I don’t know how you guys are doing it.”

“After a certain point,” Jihoon begins, eyes dead, raising a single nugget to his lips, “you just stop giving a shit.”

“So, what’s the real deal?” It’s bad social manners not to look at someone who’s talking to you, but Wonwoo can’t stand the thought of watching Junhui eat. “What made you decide to come hang out with us?”

“Technically, you made that decision for me,” Wonwoo reminds him, “but I don’t know why I called you. I didn’t even mean to.”

“Bullshit,” Junhui coughs not-so-subtly into his hand.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s no use lying,” Jihoon says around another nugget. “I think all three of us know it’s got something to do with that guy.”

“Admit you’re in love with him,” Junhui challenges. “You don’t want to admit it because you don’t want me to be right, but trust me.” He taps a thumb right between his eyes. “The nose knows.” Wonwoo voids his lungs as loudly as he can.

“I’m ignoring that.” Junhui frowns and eats another disgusting abomination. “It’s just, today, we went to a drive-in to see _Cars_ , and then I—”

“Wait just a second,” Jihoon juts in. “First, that totally sounds like a date. Second, you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who would like _Cars_.”

“I hate _Cars_.”

“So why did you go?”

“Well, I thought it was supposed to be _The Smurfs_.” Jihoon purses his lips.

“That doesn’t really seem up your alley either.”

“It’s not.”

“Which begs the question again: why did you go?” Junhui’s eyes are big and expectant, and Wonwoo doesn’t have anything to tell him.

“I don’t know,” he says. It sounds so hollow and exhausted he can hardly believe it’s his own voice, yet there the sound goes, off his tongue and onto the air, undeniably from his mouth. Junhui’s stare is vacant for a minute before his face morphs into a smug grin.

“You definitely know,” Junhui asserts, “and you’re just pretending to be thick about it because you’re a weenie.”

“Excuse me?” Wonwoo chokes.

“You probably did something weird like check him out because you didn’t want to watch the actual movie,” he elaborates, and Wonwoo is chilled to the bone by the accuracy of his intuition, “and now you’re feeling all weird because you refuse to admit to yourself that you went just because you _wanted_ to check him out.”

“I did _not_.”

“Well, let’s say you didn’t,” Junhui allows, “but if I somehow convinced you to go see _Cars_ with me—”

“Which you would never be able to.”

“Let me finish. Even if I could convince you, you wouldn’t check me out.” He lays a tender hand over his heart. “And objectively, I’m gorgeous.” Jihoon snorts, but doesn’t deny it. Wonwoo can’t say he’s ever looked at Junhui with a gaze objective enough to notice, but maybe it’s true. Even so, he can’t concede here.

“I never said I was checking him out.”

“Fine. Look me dead in the eyes and say you weren’t.”

“No,” Jihoon intrudes, getting his final few chews in on a nugget. “Look _me_ in the eyes and say you weren’t.”

Jihoon has really sharp eyes, scarily sharp, enough that Wonwoo doesn’t think he’s directly met them more than a handful of times. He always looks like he knows things, things he shouldn’t know, and Wonwoo is certain beyond any shadow of any doubt that he will either not have the strength to lie directly into those eyes or he’ll be immediately seen through if he does. Given the present options, he’d infinitely rather lie to Junhui’s face, because he seems like he wouldn’t catch it, but there’s no way it won’t be suspicious if he ignores Jihoon’s demand. He’s going to have to at least try.

“I wasn’t checking him out,” Wonwoo says, eyes dead set on Jihoon’s, tone calm, voice smooth. Nailed it.

“Liar,” Jihoon spits without hesitation, and he groans. The subsequent peals of laughter that roll out of Jihoon’s lungs are loud enough to knock the walls of the restaurant down. At least, that’s how Wonwoo feels. “Did you really think you could get past me?” No, Wonwoo wants to admit. He didn’t think it for even a second, but he’s got way too much pride to admit defeat like that.

“I didn’t _mean_ to,” Wonwoo defends. “It just… you know, I was letting my eyes wander, and, uh—”

“He caught you,” Junhui ventures. His ability to guess right on the money is terrifying. “And now it’s awkward.”

“Do you even get how awkward?” Wonwoo fires back. “We’re barely even friends. We hated each other one month ago.” His forehead smacks against the tabletop. “Everything is just fucked.” Wonwoo sighs, and Junhui claps a hand on his shoulder a little too hard.

“Chin up, buttercup,” he drawls. “I’m sure if you ignore it for long enough, it’ll go away.”

“You’re a piece of shit,” Wonwoo tells him. “You know that, right?”

“Just because your eyes aren’t good enough to see how great I am doesn’t mean you need to take it out on me.” He plunges another fry into his steadily depleting supply of ice cream and thrusts it Wonwoo’s direction. “Wanna try? It’ll make you feel better.”

“No way,” Wonwoo tells him, shoving Junhui’s hand away. “I like Burger King fries better, anyway.” Two sets of eyes are on him in an instant.

“Traitor,” they both whisper, and Wonwoo feels sick.

By the time he turns in for the evening, Wonwoo is a million times more tired than he has ever been in his life due to a variety of factors, namely Junhui being in general more annoying than anyone else he has ever met, and he vows to delete that number from his phone just in case he should ever get the bright idea to call someone from his contact list again. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, he wonders if he should send Soonyoung a text trying to clear the air and make things less weird or if that would just make it weirder. Wonwoo doesn’t usually text him first, so probably the second thing. He huffs. Wonwoo is pretty notorious for being shoddy in the feelings department. Things would have been so much simpler if they could have just kept hating each other forever.

Perhaps there is a little merit to Junhui’s advice, though. Just ignore it and it’ll go away? The more he thinks about it, Wonwoo can absolutely do that. He’s fantastic at ignoring things. Ever since he was a child, he’s been ignoring stuff, things teachers said to him and the nasally voices of other kids his own age. By now, he’s basically a pro, able to ignore pretty much anything that isn’t a direct injury or an annoying coworker’s voice buzzing inside his ear. It’s a wonder he didn’t realize before that he’s the god of ignoring things. Piece of cake, he thinks. Problem solved. His head is totally clear when he finally falls asleep.

Great conclusions reached at night, however, are often realized to be extremely not great come the morning, and when Wonwoo gets to Japanese class, he learns this is one of them. Soonyoung still smiles like he’s glad to see him, but Wonwoo has to do a lot of ignoring to pretend it’s exactly like normal. Fortunately for him, sensei demands they have different partners from usual with an iron fist, so he gets to do his dialogue practice with Joshua instead, but it doesn’t give him the same satisfaction it would have not too long ago. That’s another thing he finds pretty difficult to ignore.

He also can’t really ignore the texts he gets from Soonyoung on Saturday afternoon, how there’s something distinctly off about them. There are three, and they come right in a row, with only a minute between each. The first asks Wonwoo if he’s working. The second asks if he has any plans if he’s not working, and the third asks if he wants to do something later. What’s uncommon about them is that Soonyoung is usually the kind of guy to condense thirty questions into one text rather than send them off one at a time. He is also known to punctuate his texts with abundant emojis, and all three of these lack that typical Soonyoungish flair. Wonwoo screws himself over by noticing those details instead of ignoring them and figures he may as well admit he’s free.

Soonyoung pulls up when the sun has already started to set, fading from glowing McDonald’s sign yellow to burning McDonald’s fry container red and passing through an array of oranges on its way down. It’s still weird for Wonwoo every time he gets in Soonyoung’s car since it used to be such a beacon of every evil in the world, especially when he spies the Burger King visor and uniform shirt balled up on the backseat. Much unlike Junhui’s purified car, Soonyoung’s totally smells like he brings his work home with him, a single sad freshener hanging off the mirror by a thread that’s too thin.

“Howdy,” he warbles when Wonwoo climbs in, very close to his usual cheerfulness, but markedly different. “Anything you wanna do today?”

“I assumed there was something you wanted to do,” Wonwoo admits, jamming the buckle into its fixture at his hip. The engine makes an unsettling rattling noise when Soonyoung rouses it back into motion and turns out onto the road.

“I guess I didn’t really have anything planned,” he muses, “I just kinda wanted to hang out.”

“That’s fine with me,” Wonwoo tells him, but it’s really not fine, because he can’t quite trust himself not to say something dumb and he would have a way easier time avoiding the issue altogether if he had stayed home to play that Naruto game he has for his Xbox. Too late for regrets now.

While Soonyoung drives, he follows a sequence of turns that Wonwoo finds uncomfortably familiar, an order of roads that he knows for sure he sees too much. For a while, he affords Soonyoung the benefit of the doubt, but he’s forced to abandon it when they pull into the parking lot, around the side of the building into a drive-thru lane Wonwoo doesn’t usually experience this side of.

“Why the hell are we at McDonald’s?” he barks, and Soonyoung jumps out of his seat, scratches the back of his head meekly.

“I wanted some ice cream, and I really like the soft serve here,” he confesses. He really seems cute now that Wonwoo’s already let himself think it once. It’s not helping. “Do you want anything?”

“I don’t exactly have great associations with soft serve ice cream cones because of you.”

“Right,” Soonyoung wheezes. He orders two ice cream cones.

Since it’s Saturday night, the streets are busy, overflowing with colorful traffic and too-bright headlights, slow-moving and headache-inducing. Soonyoung drives patiently, worms them out of the main roads around campus and off in a direction Wonwoo’s not sure he’s ever been before. There’s still a tiny bit of traffic, but it’s quieter, thins out the further they go, until only a few other vehicles dance with them on the asphalt. The untouched ice cream has started to melt a little by the time they pull into the parking lot for a small park lit by two streetlamps.

“Would you grab those?” Soonyoung says when he gets out, nodding his head at the two cones carefully nestled in the cup holders on the console. Considering Wonwoo doesn’t plan on eating them, he’s inclined to say no, but Soonyoung is already closing the door and they’ll just make a mess if left in there, so he sighs and grabs them anyway.

A river runs by past the park’s boundaries, coolly reflecting the cloudless navy sky back up at itself, calm ripples stirring the water where fish get too bold or ducks paddle by, and the riverside seems to be Soonyoung’s destination of choice. He marches past the graveled square of the park’s tiny playground and shows no sign of stopping until he’s nearly reached the water. When Wonwoo reaches his side, he plucks one of the ice cream cones from his grasp.

“What’s my license plate number?” he asks.

“616FVO,” Wonwoo rattles off without thinking. “Why?”

“I just wanted to see if you still remembered it,” he says. For a while, it’s quiet, nothing but the soft lap of the water at the riverbank and the quiet hum of bugs who haven’t finished sticking around yet, and Wonwoo wonders what exactly they’re doing here. He can only see one star from where he stands, far in the distance and dimly twinkling, and he’s desperate to ask if they came here for any special reason but too proud to risk sounding stupid. After a long time, Soonyoung turns away from the river bank and faces him head on.

“Alright, Wonwoo,” he says. “Throw your ice cream at me.” Wonwoo’s ears catch up ten beats late.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re not eating it, right? So throw it. Beam me right in the chest.”

“Why do you want me to throw it at you?”

“For justice,” Soonyoung says, taking a bite off his cone. “I deserve it.”

“I already splashed a drink all over you. I’m not doing this.”

“Please, Wonwoo,” he begs. “If you don’t nail me in the ribs with that ice cream cone right now, I will never be able to feel good about anything again ever in my life.”

“No need to be so dramatic,” Wonwoo tells him.

“I’m serious,” Soonyoung says, and he sure sounds serious. It kind of freaks Wonwoo out.

“What about your shirt?”

“I have other shirts.” There’s hesitation on Wonwoo’s face, and Soonyoung spots it. “Come on. I’ve been mentally preparing myself for this.”

“Guess I have no choice, then.”

With no further argument, Wonwoo takes a few steps back, cautiously starts winding his arm up like he remembers Soonyoung had what feels like years ago, twisting back until the maximum amount of tension is gathered in his arm, then, after one held breath, he swings his arm back forward and sends the cone flying through the air toward Soonyoung’s waiting chest. It makes a beautiful curve in the air before being abruptly cut off by the body it hits, full vanilla splatter on a perfectly crisp T-shirt. In a past life, Soonyoung was probably a terrific stunt actor; he lets the force of the treat’s impact knock him to the grass, back flat against the ground for him to stare up at the empty night sky.

“Thanks,” Soonyoung wheezes, extending a thumbs up from where he lies. Wonwoo waddles over and looks down at the grinning mug fit snugly into a halo of disgusting grass. He knows it’s so fucking gross for Soonyoung to by lying fully on the ground, yet he can’t bring himself to mind as much as he’d like. Such is the nonsense of youth.

“Feel better, champ?”

“Terrific,” Soonyoung guffaws. He lifts one hand and uses it to pat the back of Wonwoo’s calf, elbow resting on the toe of his shoe. “Now that that’s over with, I want to tell you something.” Wonwoo gulps.

“That doesn’t sound good,” he says, and Soonyoung laughs again, fills all the empty air.

“I guess it doesn’t,” he admits, hand unmoving from Wonwoo’s leg. “But I’ll be blunt with you. When I saw you were in my class on that first day in the semester, your face was the ugliest thing I had ever seen in my life. I was mad enough to shit my pants.”

“Interesting.”

“Yeah. I was fully prepared to devote my entire semester to brutally hating your guts, and I really would have, but I guess sensei has some seventh sense or something, because she obviously didn’t let me. When we finally got that assignment done, I started thinking you might not be that bad after all. Obviously, I still had to keep my guard up, just in case you were a total asshole like I thought. You know how it is.”

“Oh, totally.” Soonyoung laughs again.

“Yeah. Anyway, I realized you’re actually not ugly. You’re super good-looking.” Wonwoo doesn’t want to get red, damn it, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t. Soonyoung pats his leg again. “What I’m trying to say is, I think I like you, and if your coworkers are right about you being madly in love with me, I don’t think that would be half bad.”

“Real slick of you to insert that ‘madly’ on your own.”

“I’m sure the guys you work with would side with me on it.” Wonwoo shudders knowing they definitely would and falls to take a seat on the ground beside his head. Don’t think about the possibility of bugs, he tells himself. It’ll only ruin the moment. Soonyoung exhales. “In hindsight, I’m realizing it may have been a bad idea to tell you this with a potentially really awkward car ride back in front of us.”

“Hindsight’s 20/20,” Wonwoo tells him, and Soonyoung’s smile subsides a little bit, eyes fall shut. Now. Here’s a chance.

With one hand shielding Soonyoung’s lowered lids, Wonwoo leans forward, down and down until his lips have found Soonyoung’s in the dark, soft and short and simple. When he leans back to sit upright, he drops his hand from Soonyoung’s face and digs it into his pocket. Soonyoung’s eyes are still closed. He hums.

“I believe a huge fly may have just landed on my lips,” he muses, eyelids fluttering back open to allow him vision. “Mind doing that again and letting me see this time?”

“Maybe when you’re not lying on the ground with ice cream all over you.”

“How cruel. You did this to me.”

“You’re a restaurant for bugs right now,” Wonwoo informs him. “I want no part of it.”

“Shit!” Soonyoung shouts like he’s only just realizing, springing to his feet and tearing his shirt off, throwing it in the park garbage can and dusting off every part of his body he thinks might have come into contact with an insect pest. “Why the hell didn’t you bring that up sooner?”

“My bad,” Wonwoo says with a grin. “I was under the impression you had a brain up there.” Soonyoung’s frown is weary.

“Damn,” he whistles. “I just realized that you actually are a huge dick and I fucking hate you.”

“Guess we better get started on that awkward car ride home then, huh?” Wonwoo suggests. Soonyoung trudges back to the car with rolling eyes and a strong huff.

Wonwoo kisses him one more time before they leave, over the console before he’s strapped his seatbelt on. Soonyoung had to resort to putting on his Burger King polo, which is completely hideous and stupid-looking and the absolute last thing Wonwoo would ever want to see on someone he’s about to kiss—excepting, of course, a McDonald’s polo—but it’s not quite ugly enough to get Wonwoo to not kiss him, which is probably the only thing that really counts. Soonyoung laughs into his mouth, which is another thing that counts, and his earring jingles when he does, a sound Wonwoo never thought he would be able to tolerate, let alone enjoy. Life comes at you fast sometimes.

There are occasions where he still thinks working at McDonald’s was the worst thing he’s ever done since exiting the womb twenty years ago, like when he walks into the broom closet and finds Junhui and Jihoon too close together to be having a wholesome conversation about work or when he slips on a legitimate pool of grease while fetching an order and probably bruises his tailbone only to get laughed at by his manager for twelve minutes, but there are also many times where he thinks there are much worse things he could have ended up doing. When the scales are balanced and push comes to shove and whatever other clichéd phrase left plays out, there are worse things that can happen in life than having an ice cream cone thrown at you in the drive-thru window. Wonwoo gets it now that he’s spent a painfully long time learning.

Maybe he still gets angry sometimes and sends a stray ice cube down the back of Soonyoung’s shirt when he isn’t paying attention, but that’s not important. What matters is that he gets it. He only actively regrets working at McDonald’s 50% of the time instead of 90%, and he swears on his own life that he gets it.

**Author's Note:**

> thank u for reading!! writing this was a nice long journey of a) worrying about creeping deadlines and b) realizing how much i genuinely like writing soonwoo. i tried my best i think to give this tag something a little better than i gave it last time and i'm hoping i succeeded. i hope u enjoyed if u decided to read, really and truly, and thanks so much again for showing up to the party. be sure to support all the other terrific fics that are part of this exchange when they start popping up!! u won't regret it!!  
> as always, feedback is greatly appreciated, and thanks so much for reading!!


End file.
